Sonic SatAM Liberations
A 4-player action game, based on the show!

----0.1.1
-Updated Rotor's running stage version; his backwalk used to be his normal walk, now he stays on the hoverboard.
-Slightly increased Tails and Antoine's attack power.
-Fixed the death animation bug that occurred in Astral Espionage Act 2.
-Changed Boss 1's targeted attack. Instead of a missile spam, it's now rapid artillery shots.
-Changed the "stage clear" theme to the episode title card theme from SatAM
-Added the SatAM episode title card graphic as the background for the "stage clear" screen

NOTE: For some people, the game may crash once you run the .exe included in the archive. If this happens, delete the Saves folder, and try again. This issue is only for the Windows version of the game.

Sonic SatAM Liberations is a 4-player action game based on the 1993 American TV series, Sonic The Hedgehog--better known as Sonic SatAM. It's primarily developed by myself, and co-developed by DJGameFreakTheIguana (developer of Sega Brawlers Megamix). The game features six playable characters, four Zones with two Acts each, and clips from the actual TV series as cutscenes in-game.

There are three game modes: Story, Arcade, and Character Profiles. Story Mode is the game as it was intended, with cutscenes and all. Arcade Mode is identical to story, but without the cutscenes. And Character Profiles will let you view a brief history of the main cast to familiarize yourself with the series.

The game was developed with the OpenBOR engine--meaning it can be played on any platform that runs OpenBOR. This includes popular homebrew consoles like Wii, PSP, and Dreamcast. The zip archive contains the Windows version of OpenBOR, preconfigured; so all you have to do is run OpenBOR.exe to play. I have included other versions of OpenBOR in the "Other Systems" folder, if you choose to play on another platform. Please view the (extensive) readme file for installation instructions.

In fact, for all other information about the game, including specific details on how the characters play, please view the enclosed readme. /> Otherwise, the How To Play option in-game should be sufficient to get you started. It's quite simple.

If you're playing with the included Windows version, the default controls are: A to jump, S to attack, Enter for Start/Pause, arrow keys to move, and F12 to take a screenshot. You can change these keys at any time under Options -> Control Options -> Setup Player #. Of course, most gamepads should be supported with the PC build as well.

One last note: for the best experience, I recommend you set Music Volume in Options to at least 200. This is because OpenBOR outputs audio at a rather low volume by default. If you're playing from the Windows OpenBOR version in the zip archive, all the configs are already set up.

I hope you enjoy!

Known Issues: - In the 2D platforming level, sometimes the player's death animation will freeze for about 10 seconds. You'll respawn shortly after like normal. We're working on resolving this little bug. Fixed!
- The audio in the cutscenes may be a little off-sync depending on the machine you're using to run the game. Generally speaking, the lower end your specs, the higher the chance the audio can be off-sync. I've personally tested this on my 5-year old laptop and Wii, with no syncing problems. But your mileage may vary.

Odd. The .exe is the OpenBOR engine, so it's a problem with your machine running the build and not the game itself (the game is in the Paks folder). Think of OpenBOR as the emulator and the .Pak file as the ROM--it's something like that, though OpenBOR is not an emulator.

Anyways. Can you do some diagnostics for me?

- Check the Logs folder and OpenBORLogs.txt. What does it say?
- Rename the Saves folder to anything, or just delete it. Perhaps my preconfigured settings is doing something wrong on your PC. It may be because of the video settings I have it set to.
- Did you extract the main folder from the zip, or are you running OpenBOR.exe from the zip itself? If it's the latter, please extract the folder and run the .exe that way.

EDIT: If removing the Saves folder did nothing, try downloading the OpenBOR engine here. Extract the "WINDOWS" folder, put the SonicSatAMLib_SAGE2015.pak in the new Paks folder, and then try running it. If it still doesn't work, we have problems that I need to address ASAP.

EDIT 2: I downloaded the game from the link in the first post onto my brother's laptop. It worked just fine, but mind you his is a Windows 8. This is very odd.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience. It works fine on my 64-bit Windows 7, and I had a few personal friends test it on their Windows computers as well. Let's see if we can't resolve this.

- Is there any way you can make cutscenes skippable? That seemed to be a pretty key feature that was missing, Arcade mode aside. 5 Minute unskippables are NO GOOD.

- For the second boss, is there any way to speed up the missile drops? The only way to get hit by them is if you deliberately try to get hit. Also, the ending explosion seems very drawn out. Maybe speed those up a bit?

- I'd recommend lowering the text boxes a bit. Regardless of level, they end up covering most of the space where the gameplay happens, leaving you to guess at what's actually happening there. Overlap is unavoidable, but there should be a way to make it better, right?

- The green walker boss can't reach you with his flamethrower if you hug the left side of the screen.

- You can chase the Gorilla boss all the way back to the beginning of the level.

I'm rapidly approaching my trial member 20-post limit, so from now on I'll be replying quite sparingly. I apologize if this causes any inconvenience.

RGamer2009, on 11 December 2015 - 01:13 PM, said:

Deleting the Saves folder let the program run, for anyone else having a crashing problem.

Excellent! I'll update the first post with this information, thank you so much. I had a feeling this was the issue. Besides controls and music volume, one of my preconfigued settings was the screen size. I set it to windowed mode, 2x unfiltered. The default resolution for the game is 320x240, so I thought I'd do everyone a favor by setting it up to display at 640x480 by default. It seems that can cause issues with some machines. I'm glad we found the solution--and I'll keep this incident in mind the next time I release an update.

Pexs, on 11 December 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

This is a very fun game! Nice work.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Pexs, on 11 December 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

- Is there any way you can make cutscenes skippable? That seemed to be a pretty key feature that was missing, Arcade mode aside. 5 Minute unskippables are NO GOOD.

So. Without getting into the technical nuances of the OpenBOR engine, here's the short answer: the best I can do is make it so that the cutscenes are skippable after the first 30 seconds. Initially, this is how the game was set up. I later decided to make them completely unskippable, as I figured if you didn't want to see them, you'd have played Arcade Mode instead. In lieu of your feedback, I may return the cutscenes to that setting for future releases.

Pexs, on 11 December 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

- For the second boss, is there any way to speed up the missile drops? The only way to get hit by them is if you deliberately try to get hit. Also, the ending explosion seems very drawn out. Maybe speed those up a bit?

The missile drop speed is by design. It's only the second boss, so I didn't want it to be too difficult. I could make it fall faster, but then I believe the fight would be masochistic. You have to remember that the pacing of the fight is controlled by several factors: the boss' weakpoint descending from the ship, the missiles, and the spike balls--which have three different timing patterns. If the missiles dropped faster, it would force the player to manage their location in relation to all of the projectiles in a more rapid succession. This could be a frustrating experience, especially considering you're only about ten minutes into the game at that point.

Ah, but a thought just occurred to me: by second boss, do you perhaps mean the first boss? As in, you counted the Zone 1 Act 1 miniboss as the first, and then the Zone 1 Act 2 boss as the second? In that case, it's definitely by design, as that fight is meant to be a sort of "welcome" for future boss fights. But here, I think your criticism is legitimate, in that the missiles during that fight don't pose as much of a threat as they could. I'll see what I can do for the next update.

Pexs, on 11 December 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

- I'd recommend lowering the text boxes a bit. Regardless of level, they end up covering most of the space where the gameplay happens, leaving you to guess at what's actually happening there. Overlap is unavoidable, but there should be a way to make it better, right?

I tried to avoid that by spawning the textboxes when relatively easy enemies were on-screen. For example, the Swatbots, who always die in one hit regardless of which character you use. I'll talk it over with DJ and consider your recommendation for the next update.

Pexs, on 11 December 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

- The green walker boss can't reach you with his flamethrower if you hug the left side of the screen.

Wellp. That's an embarrassing oversight.

Pexs, on 11 December 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

- You can chase the Gorilla boss all the way back to the beginning of the level.

This is by design. I made the platforms in that level simple enough that it would be easy to backtrack. The boss' AI is set up to bait the player into chasing after it. The difficulty of the fight, then, is combining your desire to land a hit, while trying not to fall into a bottomless pit, while also avoiding the laser beam cannons that chase you. Sidenote, I really have to give props to DJ on his work with the laser beam cannons. Without him, the fight would've only been against the gorilla--which, in my opinion, would've been way too easy.

It's been a while, but I'm back with a minor update. It's mainly a bugfix for the death bug that occurred in Astral Espionage Act 2, along with some other tweaks.

If you're wondering why the filesize is so much larger, it's because of the cutscene data for future stages that we're currently working on.

Additionally, the game should no longer crash upon opening for some people, meaning you won't need to delete the Saves folder. In the event it still does crash, however, then deleting that folder should fix everything.

The download link can be found on the first post. A mediafire mirror will be posted shortly as well.

I'm quickly reaching my 20-post trial member limit, so I apologize if I'm unable to respond to comments or inquiries. (It sure would be nice if someone approved me though, wink wink.)